We need a new family car, and this is closer to the kind that I want than all of the stuff on the market today. Too many extraneous chips, computers, and sensors, any one of which will cost you $$$$ when it inevitably fails. Just give me something that gets us safely from point A to point B, C, & D, reliably, with a minimum of fuss. Extra points if it’s simple enough that I can usually fix it myself.
I had a very interesting discussion with Thomas Umstattd Jr. recently, about George Friedman’s recent book The Storm Before the Calm and the general state of the zeitgeist. My theory has been that the current fourth turning will not end with a first turning high in the 2030s and 2040s, as Strauss-Howe generational theory predicts, but will skip that stage and go straight to the awakening instead, as it did with the anomaly in the Civil War cycle. This awakening will ultimately give us a major Christian revival, such as we haven’t seen in more than 100 years.
Thomas has a very different take on it, though. He thinks that we may just be entering into the very beginning of the fourth turning right now—that all of the chaos of the last ten years was really just the closing half of the third turning “unraveling” era, which ran unusually long (about 35 years instead of the normal 22ish years). He thinks that the fourth turning began with the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and will likely involve a major civil conflict here in the United States.
The more I think about it, the more his take makes sense. Strauss-Howe generational theory is based on the four phases of a human life (childhood/adolescence, young adulthood/parenthood, middle age, and elderhood), and the Great Recession was a major disruption that forced a lot of my fellow millennials to put off getting married and starting a family. Same thing with the boomers, who postponed their retirement for an extra decade. So it makes sense that the result would be an extra-long third turning, with most of us putting off that next phase of our lives.
It would also explain why none of the recent wars have exploded into hot global conflicts until now. The Russo-Ukraine war, the Gaza war, the Syrian and Yemeni civil wars, and even to some extent the current Iran war have all mostly been confined to small regions. Yes, the major powers all have a hand in them, and are jockeying for position against each other, but it hasn’t yet escalated beyond a proxy conflict, and/or economic and financial sanctions.
In other words, up until now, most of the geopolitical conflicts have been limited to the sort of thing you’d be likely to see during a third turning. President Trump has been less of a Roosevelt or a Lincoln or a Washington, leading our newly-unified nation through a major existential crisis, and more of a Zachary Taylor or a James Buchanan (or his own personal favorite, Andrew Jackson) imposing his vision on a fragmented country with only limited success, as everyone kicks and screams to get off the train. That’s much more typical of an unraveling era president than a crisis era president.
So what does this mean? If Thomas is right and we are only just now entering into the opening phase of a fourth turning, things are likely to get very, very bad in the next few years. Our country (and indeed, most of the rest of the world) is likely to face a major existential threat in the form of an armed conflict. A hot civil war here in the US could be a major component of this, though it could also be a global nuclear or biological war. But the big thing is that the war itself is going to eclipse basically everything we’ve seen in the last couple of decades, including 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I think there’s a very high likelihood that the Russo-Ukraine war and the US war in Iran merge and become one conflict, especially since the US is a major supplier to Ukraine and Iran is a major supplier to Russia. I don’t know if China will attempt a military invasion of Taiwan, but I do think they will continue to push psyops here in the US, both to disrupt our data center buildout and to push more radical left-wing politicians into the mainstream (though to be clear, that’s not just limited to China). We could also see some major acts of sabotage, both from China and the Iran/Russia axis.
The big wild card, of course, is how AI will play into the coming conflict. All of the major players are convinced that whoever controls the emergent AI technology will ultimately control the world, so the AI arms race is likely to turn into even more of a sprint, with very little regard to AI safety. I’m still quite skeptical that this will result in a Skynet-style robot apocalypse, or the worst fears of guys like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, but it could.
Point is, as bad as things seem right now, if we really are just now entering into the current cycle’s fourth turning, things are going to get much, much worse than anything we’ve seen until now. And the coming conflict will probably extend well into the 2040s, since that’s about as long as it takes for a generational turning to resolve. Which means that right around the time when we are due to resolve the conflict and enter into a generational high, we will instead be facing the unavoidable consequences of the fertility crisis and demographic collapse. So it may turn out that Thomas and I are both right, and we never see a first turning high.
I loved all the books of the Hyperion Cantos, and felt that the last book ended as strong as the first book started. One of the best science fiction series of all time. For that reason, The Rise of Endymion heartily earns my vote. It was a magnificent 700 pages and I thoroughly loved it.
I didn’t enjoy The Forever Peace nearly as much, and DNFed it after the first couple of chapters. It’s been several years, so I don’t remember exactly what pushed it over the line, but I do remember a weird scene where the main character’s consciousness was sexually merged with the other twenty people in his team, as in he was aware of having ten penises and ten vaginas, or something weird like that, and it really turned me off. Also, Haldeman writes with a very nihilistic edge, and that also must have put me off.
I started Metropolitan, the book for which City on Fire is the sequel, but I also DNFed it after the first couple of chapters. Lots of grim cyberpunk nihilism, and skimming ahead, the main character has an adulterous affair that’s played up as if it’s a reason for the reader to give her sympathy. I don’t really do that. So DNF that series.
The other two books I screened with ChatGPT and decided to skip. For Frameshift, the problem was explicit violence against young children. Now that I have young children of my own, I have zero tolerance for that sort of thing and will not read it. And with Jack Faust, there are also apparently several explicit sex scenes involving graphic depictions of lust and infedelity. Also, I’ve read enough Michael Swanwick to know that he has a tendency to inject his books with weird and creepy sex stuff. No thanks.
I’ve got another 49 books to read before I can finish this blog series and evaluate every year of the Hugo Award, sufficient to know how I would vote if every year of the awards was held today. Obviously, I’m not reading all of the books: ChatGPT is helping me a lot to screen out the worst of them, and I’m also very quick (perhaps a little too quick) to DNF a book when I don’t think it’s worthwhile. But I have found a few unexpected gems, and I hope to find a few more as I read the last 49 books.
Is there another ward that I should do instead? I kind of want to use Writers of the Future to find some new authors, though it can be tricky since many of the contest writers never write anything else—or else they go for years (sometimes decades) before producing their first novel. But the contest has produced a handful of avid career novelists like Nina Kiriki Hoffman and Dean Wesley Smith, so it’s worth checking those ones out.
This year was mostly a miss for me, though none of the books were so terrible that I’d rank them below no award. Most of them either didn’t hold my interest or were sequels of books that didn’t hold my interest.
Larry Niven is a good writer, and really great at hard science fiction—something we see very little of these days (depending on whether you’d rank Andy Weir and Adrian Tchaikovsky as hard SF authors). I’ve read and enjoyed some of Larry Niven’s books, like Protector,The Mote in God’s Eye (which he cowrote with Jerry Pournelle), and Inferno (which they also co-wrote). But I’ve also DNFed some of his books too, mostly because I got bored or couldn’t follow them as well. The Integral Trees is one example. Ringworld is another.
I should probably try rereading Ringworld again, since it’s probably Larry Niven’s most famous book. And it’s not a bad book at all. But midway through it, I lost interest, mostly because I felt that the story was more an excuse to showcase this tremendous mega-structure that Niven dreamed up than an actual story. And because The Ringworld Engineers is a direct sequel to Ringworld (and was written largely to answer some of the fan critiques of Niven’s Ringworld design), I didn’t bother reading it. But I probably should, one of these days. When I get through the rest of my ever-expanding TBR pile.
The Snow Queen was another book that didn’t really hook me, and had enough yellow flags in the first couple of chapters that I decided not to keep reading it. I might be persuaded to try it again, with a strong enough recommendation, but I don’t think it’s for me.
I’ve read (and DNFed) enough Silverberg to know that I probably won’t like anything he’s written. Too much dirty old man vibes (or dirty young man, depending on when the book was written). So I didn’t bother reading Lord Valentine’s Castle. He’s a fantastic writer who really has a way with language. But he spent too much time writing porn, and it really rubs off into everything else.
I finished the first Heechee book by Frederik Pohl, and enjoyed it well enough, though it very clearly pushed Freudian and Malthusian thinking. Perhaps, because of that, I really couldn’t get into Beyond the Blue Event Horizon. The first book, Gateway, had enough of a hook to keep me going to the end of that book, but the other ideological baggage kept me from wanting to read any more. But it wasn’t so preachy that I’d call it “woke,” just not my kind of thing.
As for Wizard, I screened it with ChatGPT first and decided to skip it. Here is what the chatbot said:
The Gaea Trilogy (Titan, Wizard, Demon) is famous for being imaginative, brilliant… and filled with extremely adult, often bizarre sexual content. Wizard is the most explicit of the three.
The worldview is hedonistic, amoral, and body-centered.
The spiritual/moral framework is essentially nihilistic.
Sexual behavior is portrayed as a tool of power and experimentation.
One subplot involves sexual violence between adults (coercion/manipulation).
Several scenes go well beyond typical adult-SF boundaries into outright erotica.
If I had read and DNFed it, I probably would have ranked it below No Award, which would have forced a big change to the ballot. But I’m not going to rank a book below No Award just because I screened it and decided not to read it. I want to actually try to read it myself before I make that judgment.
With that said, though, I have no desire to read Wizard after what the AI screening told me. So there you go.
Every couple of months, I discount all of my $4.99 ebooks to $2.99 for a couple of weeks. From now until the end of the month, you can get any of my ebooks for $2.99. Check it out!
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer
The Actual Results
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin
Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer
The Sky Road by Ken Macleod
Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson
How I Would Have Voted
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
No Award
Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer
Explanation
I remember when everyone used to rave about George R.R. Martin. Many people said he was the American Tolkien, and not just because of the “R.R.” initials in his name. They said he was revolutionizing epic fantasy—that he was doing tremendous things for the genre, subverting expectations in a way that was pure genius. All of us who were writing fantasy at the time fell somewhere under his shadow.
Today, I believe that few people have done more to destroy epic fantasy than George R.R. Martin. His Game of Thrones TV series, which was probably faithful to his outline for the books, ended so badly that no one talks about the show today, except to share this meme:
Larry Correia also makes an excellent point that by failing to finish his series, Martin has placed an impossible burden on up-and-coming epic fantasy authors by burning out readers on the genre. Because of Martin (and also Patrick Rothfuss), readers became unwilling to try out a new author until they had already finished their epic fantasy series. But because epic fantasies are so massive they take a long time to write, making this almost impossible for both indie and tradpub authors if the first book isn’t a commercial success.
The one upside to this vicious cycle is that it gave us my favorite fantasy meme of all time:
(So what does it say that Sanderson now sports a beard? Are we living in the shadow universe??)
But I think that Martin ruined epic fantasy much earlier than all that. In fact, I think that the worst damage he did to the genre was back when books 2 and 3 came out, because of how it normalized pornography, graphic violence, and nihilism. Because of this, I think it’s more accurate to call Martin the anti-Tolkien, because Tolkien’s secret sauce was the deep spiritual undercurrent in all of his works. And it’s because of Tolkien’s reverence for things spiritual that Lord of the Rings will probably still be read two hundred years from now, when no one remembers George R.R. Martin’s name.
Martin set out to subvert reader expectations, including the expectation that his books would exalt the good, the true, and the beautiful. At the time, epic fantasy readers were burned out on all the Tolkien clones, and were hungry for something new. Martin’s dark and gritty tone was a breath of fresh air—or so they thought. And the TV series brought in a host of new fans, most of whom came for the bare boobs and the brutal bloodsport.
But Martin’s books were fundamentally broken, and he knew it. In his eagerness to subvert expectations, he put himself in a position where he could not write a satisfying ending without denying the fundamental premise on which the whole series attempts to stand. Sargon of Akkad says it best in this video:
So in the end, it turned out that the greatest expectation Martin subverted was the expectation that he would finish the damned books. All of which is why I believe that A Storm of Swords rightfully belongs below No Award on this ballot.
A Storm of Swords wasn’t the only dark and gritty book on the ballot for this year. I screened Midnight Robber with AI, and ultimately decided to skip it. Here is what ChatGPT said:
Sexual Violence: A central plot element involves Tan-Tan being subjected to sexual abuse by a family member. This experience shapes much of her growth and her eventual rebellion against the oppressive environment. While these events are not gratuitously described, they are explicit enough to be disturbing and are critical to the narrative.
Hopkinson’s work delves into themes of colonialism, identity, and resilience. By incorporating Caribbean dialect and folklore, the novel celebrates cultural heritage and critiques systemic oppression. Tan-Tan’s transformation into the Robber Queen symbolizes empowerment and resistance against patriarchal and colonial structures.
I also decided to skip The Sky Road, partly for content issues, but mostly to avoid the leftist message fiction. Here is what ChatGPT said:
The Sky Road is probably not a good fit for you because politics is central to the story rather than merely part of the background. It spends substantial time on communist and socialist ideas, revolutionary history, ideological factions, nuclear politics, and debates about how society should be organized… On top of that, the book begins with a casual extramarital sex scene and treats the relationship without much moral concern.
I cannot stand message fiction. Not from the left, and not from the right. I recently tried to read Camp of the Saints, which lots of people on the right are now extolling because of the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe, but I DNFed it ten pages in because it’s just pure message fiction.
I really wanted to like Calculating God, because 1) Robert J. Sawyer is a genuinely good writer, and 2) the premise (that an alien scientist shows up at Earth and is surprised to find that many of us don’t believe in God, because all of the aliens certainly believe) was genuinely intriguing. But after getting about halfway through the book, it started to devolve into a cartoonish plot pitting the good guys against Creationist saboteurs. Skipping to the end, I realized that the book is devoid of all nuance: Sawyer’s answer to the creationism vs. evolutionism debate isn’t to point out that it’s a false binary, but to posit a transhumanist deism as the actual one true path. Really?
This is my issue with Sawyer: he isn’t at all comfortable with ontological ambiguity. If the Bible says that God created the world in seven days, then it must mean seven literal days, not seven temporal periods, or seven poetic divisions for literary effect, or seven stages in the temple liturgy meant to symbolically represent God’s role in the creation to the pre-literate, pre-scientific society of the ancient Hebrews, or any of the other non-literal readings of Genesis. That frankly makes him more of a creationist than me, a deeply religious and devoted believer in Christ.
This aversion to nuance and ambiguity seriously hobbles his books. I remember reading the last paragraph of The Terminal Experiment and laughing out loud when he described how the soul particle (which was the premise of the book) of the main character flew up and merged once again with God, who is really just the source of all soul particles in the universe. He obviously thought he was being profound, but he made it so literal that I felt he was trying to bash a round peg into a square hole with a sledgehammer. Frankly, the book would have been better if that last paragraph had been cut.
Calculating God wasn’t terrible, though, or an annoying woke (or anti-woke) message book, so I’d still vote for it after No Award. I just think he flubbed it.
As for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, I think it’s a great fantasy book, and totally deserving of the award, as are all of the Harry Potter books. After 2001, though, I think the Hugo organizers changed the rules to exclude juvenile fiction, because they didn’t want Rowling to run away with the award every year. Which seems totally snobbish and asininene to me, but whatever. I don’t pretend to know how these things work.
